A Puzzle Spin-Off That’s Short Of A Tutorial And Some Simplification
I’ve got a friend who has signed up to a weird puzzle-cube subscription. Every few months, he gets a new cube in the post, and he’s sat there twiddling buttons, applying pressure in weird locations, and generally trying to get the thing open. When I’m not looking, I know he’s shaking it and smacking it on the corner of the table. It’s his thing and he loves it.
For a day, Fit and Grow was my puzzle cube. I don’t think it was intended to be one – I am confident that its designers thought they were making an intuitive, easy-to-grasp game. But I held Fit and Grow in my hands, turning it round, trying to understand how the daft thing worked. For three separate play-sessions, I laboured to understand what the hell it wanted. If I could have shaken it and smacked it on the corner of a table, I would have.
Onboarding Is For Suckers
Afil Games. I beg you. Please start adding tutorials to your games. You are making increasingly complex and conceptually interesting games, but you have to bring the player along with you. A hint and undo button just ain’t cutting it.
I got there eventually (you have to remember, this was played and reviewed before any Youtube walkthroughs were out in the wild). So when I tell you how Fit and Grow works, know that it was hard-earned.
Fit and Grow isn’t too dissimilar from the shape-sorting puzzles that Afil Games release prolifically on the Xbox Store. In those games you have to fit a selection of differently shaped tiles onto a game board. If they tessellate perfectly then you can win and move onto the next puzzle.
Growing Your Puzzle Game From Seed
In Fit and Grow, the pieces aren’t fully grown yet. They need to be left on the game board, next to a watering can that you have placed yourself, so that they can sprawl out to their correct size. Think of it as an extra layer of strategy: you are not only filling the board with shapes, but you are adding – and growing – the shapes in the correct order. If you wait too late to grow a particular plant, then it might not have time to grow and fill-out the space.
There are multiple plants, each with two growth stages. A corn-on-the-cob hooks up and to the right as its first stage, then becomes a larger ‘+’ shape with its second watering. A melon turns from an L-shape to a 2×2 square. Wheat (or what looks like wheat) is a 1×3 that can lengthen and become a 1×4. These twin stages also factor into the puzzle-making. Will you need a stumpy wheat to complete the grid, or a lengthy one?
It’s a decent idea that occasionally shines through. You can spot corners of the grid that best suit certain plants. A squared-off corner might be best for a square melon. Fit and Grow gives you precisely the number of seeds you need, no more or less, so it’s often a game of counting squares, working out how many of your seeds need to be fully grown.
An Encounter In The Little Shop Of Horrors
But Fit and Grow has a number of problems, even at this stage. We’ve already mentioned that Fit and Grow utterly fails to explain any of this. I was stuck on Level 3 for a couple of hours and three separate play-sessions, trying to untangle what was going on.
You also don’t get told what seed grows into what shape. I understand the desire to keep that under wraps: it makes Fit and Grow a game of trial-and-see-what-grows. It’s intended as a surprise. But you often don’t have grid-room to perform the trial-and-error, as you keep maneuvering the seed and watering can around to find a permutation that causes the sodding sprout to grow. And it has annoying impacts on the later game. It can be hard to remember the directions in which a melon or corn grows, and there is no cribsheet or hover-image to make this less of a problem.
Fit and Grow also loves its edge-cases and odd rules. Two watering cans can be used to skip a growth stage; seeds can be rotated; watering cans can be lifted and placed again, but seeds cannot; placing a seed triggers a growth stage, but re-placing a watering can does not; ungrown seeds can still be used to fill the grid. Fit and Grow tells you none of these quirks, and expects you to learn and memorise them. Sometimes, it’s not a bother, but when there is no explicit spoiler or skip button, and a hint system that only gives prompts, it can lead to you getting stuck.
In Desperate Need Of Some Weeding
None of this will be a problem when the walkthrough videos come out, but for me – playing before that glorious moment – the experience of playing Fit and Grow was stop-start. I kept crashing through wall after wall like the Hulk. I’d forget how a melon works, and need to get it wrong multiple times to remember. Something wouldn’t grow for an arbitrary reason, and I’d have to remember the edge-cases to figure out why.
There is a strong seed of an idea here. A rustic game of Tetris where you have to water the blocks and let them grow is a sterling idea, and I want to play it. But Fit and Grow doesn’t keep the idea tight and elegant. It plants it in a bigger pot and lets it become unruly. It grows edge-cases and oddnesses that make the whole experience thorny and unsatisfying. It’s not hard to stare through the brambles and imagine a version of Fit and Grow that’s been pruned to a more compelling shape.
Important Links
Fit And Grow Turns Gardening Into A Relaxing Puzzle Of Strategy – https://www.thexboxhub.com/fit-and-grow-turns-gardening-into-a-relaxing-puzzle-of-strategy/
Buy from the Xbox Store, optimised for Series X|S – https://www.xbox.com/en-gb/games/store/fit-and-grow-xbox-series/9mt0gsljsbdz
Buy for Xbox One – https://www.xbox.com/en-GB/games/store/fit-and-grow-xbox-one/9pjh258cg2jf
Buy for Windows PC – https://www.xbox.com/en-GB/games/store/fit-and-grow-windows/9p2zzn5xgclm
